Understand The Hot Topics In Your Team With Peakon's Text Analytics

Michael Dean • Dec 15th, 2016

Today we’re releasing a major advancement in the way Peakon analyses text feedback. Topics, a new page you’ll see on your dashboard, will summarise comments from potentially thousands of people into easily understandable topics.

Each topic is categorised by the driver it relates to. If you’re unfamiliar with Peakon’s driver methodology, these are the 14 elements of organisational psychology that influence employee engagement. For example, the Growth driver, which measures how people perceive their learning and career development in the company, could include topics like “training”, “paths” and “progress”.

As every driver question also includes a quantitative element (a score between 0 to 10) we can then display the average score of the comments that make up a topic, so you can judge the general sentiment around the subject.

Peakon will also generate a smart summary of each topic. This includes the particular sentences that are most indicative of all the comments that make up a topic, and it gives you an insight to an entire conversation in a few seconds. You can then click through to view all the comments in the topic.

As the screenshot above shows, each topic gets a dedicated page. In this case you can see all the comments that discuss feedback, in the context of how much recognition employees believe their work is given. As a manager you can then acknowledge particular comments to let individuals know they’ve been heard, or even start an anonymous dialogue with an employee using the Conversations feature.

You’ll also notice we’ve added some custom Peakon emoticons to bring comments to life, on the topics page and across the dashboard. If you’re wondering why scores of seven have rather indifferent looking faces, the emoticons relate to the eNPS scale which sees 7 and 8 as passive (because this is the median of how scores are usually distributed for eNPS).

On average, more than 30 percent of responses to Peakon questions include comments. With all this high-quality feedback, using topics to understand the key themes, will save you and your managers a huge amount of time and give you a big head start on action planning.